TY - JOUR
AU1 - Osorio Whewell,, Esther
AB - Neil Rhodes’s new account of the development of literary culture in the sixteenth century feels timely. Perhaps books about teaching always do, to teachers. While English literature holds out, wobblingly, on the Russell Group Informed Choices guide to ‘Facilitating Subjects’ at A-level (entries for English subjects down nearly a fifth since 2015, and 9 per cent in the past year alone),1 this book thinks historically about literary reach and literary point, what ought to constitute a literary agenda, and what stumps one. It asks whether the ideological – and the world-weary – undergraduates (and the ideological and the world-weary one-time undergraduates) of the English Renaissance thought you could make any money – or anything of yourself – in the big wide commonwealth with an arts degree from Cambridge; and if, indeed, not, what human or spiritual ‘profitability’ might be spun out of it instead. If it was all spin. At the fraught literary intersections and impersonations of ‘for the people’ and ‘of the people’, and between the shaking hands in Horatian negotiations of compromising and conciliating dulce and utile, Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England is a rigorous taxonomy of versions of the word ‘Common’ as defined through early modern writings of literary love and labour – and also, very much, vice versa (Rhodes is clear that, although its impetus is social, this is a book based in texts). Interested in interrogating the soapbox terminologies (ethical, aesthetic, religious, political) of literary-pedagogical undertakings, its most important keywords are ‘Renaissance’, ‘Reformation’, ‘Protestantism’, and ‘Humanism’. Rhodes’s main design is to make these four concerns lock arms – as he argues they too often don’t in early modern scholarship – to answer the question of what prompted the English Renaissance, and what prompted it to be so late. Rhodes is interested in the different characters and charismas of particular learning institutions – whether Mulcaster’s classroom, St John’s College Cambridge, or the Accademia Fiorentina in Florence – and the movement of ideas around and between them. Many of the key words and phrases which build this book’s narrative come directly out of Erasmus, or Shakespeare, or Thomas Elyot – but along the way (it seems more so as the book goes on, but maybe the sense just accumulates) there are also turns of blue-sky thinking which seem to seep out into the late 1500s from the seminar rooms and committee meetings of the modern university English faculty. Here, not unhelpfully, ‘inclusiveness’, ‘social mobility’, ‘access’ (and indeed ‘open access’), ‘impact’, ‘outreach’, ‘public engagement’ – the kinds of now ever-present terms and attendant procedures which, as Stefan Collini has recently pointed out, are only about thirty years old at most – often infiltrate discussions of accent, archaism, rhythm, barbarity. ‘Of course’, says Collini, ‘there are those who will say that it doesn’t really matter how we “talk about” universities, since it’s all just talk’ – but ‘it would not require any particularly fancy philosophical footwork to establish that our experience of the world is in part constituted by the categories we use’.2 Our experience of the historical world, too. The strip lighting of the modern academy seems quite preoccupyingly inescapable as an elucidator for Rhodes’s thinking about projects of teaching literature both quick and dead; occasionally such terminology is prefaced with ‘what we would now call’ – but definitely not always. Common is split into three main parts. The first introduces ‘Versions of the Common’, establishing its terms in texts embedded in the moment of an embryonic ‘public sphere’, midwife at ‘the birth of something called “society”’ (p. 15). ‘Common’, with all the courage of its convicted polyptotons, can provide us with a broader map of the century through its presence within a number of interlocking spheres: the political (the House of Commons); the economic (the common profit and common wealth); the religious (the Book of Common Prayer); and the legal (common law) (p. 7). Starting as they mean to go on, these first chapters are richly thick with primary sources – not quite formidably so, but fairly unstintingly. For the brave student with a narrower remit than Rhodes’s, this book would be a generously well-stocked store of signposts for different places to begin other thinking (with always thorough, sensibly selective footnotes on secondary material for following them up). Widely, deeply, and wisely read across Latin, Greek, and translated terrains, in whichever direction he sets his hand to drive the plough of textual scholarship, though God spare most readers’ lives ere many years (or at least certainly this one’s), Rhodes will know more of sixteenth-century scholarship than thou dost. But he will also steer many others towards a lot more knowledge than they had before. Not all books with wide scope widen horizons, but if you can agree to play the undaunted listening learner in the humanist dialogue, this one mostly does. Erasmus, introduced here as the utmost embodiment of an ‘overarching agenda … to reconcile classical literary culture with Christian teaching’ (pp. 7–8), is important throughout to Rhodes’s bringing together of ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Reformation’ in a single creative project. Also important throughout is a foundational argument for ‘Pure and Common Greek’ as ‘door to the vernacular’ (p. 31). Rhodes begins with scriptural contexts for this (Bible translation), and then overlays them with secular ones, predominantly Lucian, who ‘represents imaginative play and what we might now call freedom of expression, [and] became the standard-bearer for a humanist idea of what literature is’ (p. 76). Particularly in the context of an argument often unafraid of setting sixteenth-century learning lexicons in conversation with twenty-first-century ones, where nowadays, as Rhodes notes, ‘few attainments carry a greater air of elitism about them than the ability to read classical Greek’ (p. 28), Greek as a guaranteed, unassailable ‘pure source’ for grafting a notion of ‘pure English’ (where Latin is highly assailable, and reeks of Catholic), is a good corrective. The final chapter of this section establishes the problematic of a ‘literary agenda’ – aesthetic, imaginative – pulling directly against a reforming one, a fundamental ‘disconnect between the work of the imagination and the work of making common’ to which, ultimately, Rhodes attributes the late appearance of the Renaissance in England. The second, shortest, section considers the politics, faith, and imagination of ‘translation for the common good’ (p. 153) where, in line with the Reformation agenda, ‘Translation would be a version of open access, helping knowledge to circulate and turning academic learning into social benefit’ (p. 214). Always treading either side of the sacred and secular, this chapter reinforces a framework of ‘profitable’ reading and writing with ‘Translation as commodity’ as part of a growing ‘knowledge economy’. The case for translation as the skeleton key to Renaissance and Reformation at once, ‘commoning’ vernacularisation as a door pushed at for scriptural access which stayed open for literary creativity (particularly, Rhodes argues, for women), is lucid. Sketching useful perpendiculars across the x and y lines of the social grid – ‘fundamental to translation theory in general [is] that there are both vertical and horizontal lines of transmission just as there are both vertical and horizontal constructions of the “common” itself’ (p. 137) – this chapter sits comfortably at the heart of the book’s argument for literature as a social project. Terms established, the final, largest, part of the book uses these frameworks to approach, in turn, poetry, prose, and drama. The first of these sets out – against a characteristically thorough background of English prosody manuals – the ‘authority of templates’ in sixteenth-century ideas of poetic form, alongside ideas of plainness, decorum, and a ‘middle’ or ‘mean’ (as a common ground) between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literary styles, and high and low early modern social classes. This chapter offers useful and approachable histories of major verse forms (sonnet, blank verse, fourteeners, ballad metre), how they entered English and what kind of a welcome they received. Metrical experimentation – literary forms ‘at play’ – in psalm translation is set in conversation with purely secular lyrical forms. Spenser is the proper emcee for this masque of sacred and prophane, ‘elevated and popular’: via the Shepheardes Calender’s movement ‘across a stylistic spectrum, from Reformation complaint and polemic to Elizabethan courtly lyric’, where ‘fluidity of form is matched by the shifting social roles of the poem’s different voices’ (p. 201), this chapter culminates with the Faerie Queene, not only ‘the ground on which Tyndale’s insistence on the plainness and openness of the scriptures comes into direct conflict with the Elizabethan love of ingenuity, intricacy, and the coded message’ (p. 204) but also, finally, ‘the English realization of Erasmus’ dream of reconciling Christian doctrine with classical literary values’ (p. 208). The Faerie Queene’s exemplary inbetweenness in Rhodes’s narrative of poetic mean is also its target audience: ‘Though it was obviously enjoyed by the noble and the learned the Faerie Queene was also a poem for the aspirant, middling sort of English reader’ (p. 208) – the very ‘lower middle class’ (hard-working, culturally respectful, strongly invested in education as a means to social mobility) of whom Rita Felski has written that ‘Everything remains to be said’.3 The prose chapter, beginning in the Accademia Fiorentina, where the Umidi pursued ‘enthusiastically … an agenda of what we would now call outreach, public engagement, and impact’, traces the influence of Italian prose writing on what Rhodes calls the ‘Elizabethan Short Story’. We have often, Rhodes argues, gleaned from theatrical stereotypes a general sense of sensationalised ‘moral panics about the sophisticated wickedness of Italians and Italian fiction’ which, uninterrogated, risks obscuring the reality that for most forward-thinking English intellectuals in the sixteenth century, ‘Italy was the home of progressive ideas about politics and society, even about religion’ (p. 211). Through multiple influential translators of Italian prose fiction – most extensively William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure and its many offshoots – this chapter traces the continuation of ‘the theme of the common’ through the Italian short story’s particular projects of ‘social inclusiveness’, and its ‘opening up of new critical perspectives on established social norms’ (p. 224). This writing, too, Rhodes finds directed particularly ‘towards a middlebrow audience’, ‘concerned with the middle ground of life’ (p. 249). ‘There are no equivalents of the Italian academies in England, and no equivalents of the Elizabethan public theatres in Italy’ (p. 249): as the ‘perfect resource for drama’, the novella makes a good corridor from the Italian universities into a final chapter on drama. This chapter begins with clothes and class – the imaginative social mobility of sumptuary laws transgressed on stage – and makes theatre as ‘a form of idolatry’ the dramatic counterpart to ‘the charge that poetry and fiction are a form of lying’ (p. 256). Where class should always, really, be a reader’s first concern – ‘The determinant categories of modern identity politics – ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation – tend to obscure the fact that what really mattered in Elizabethan England was rank’ (p. 258) – Rhodes works first through overlashing Marlovian minds and their stage transgressions, ‘aural as well as visual’ (p. 265), of rank and status, to come at the last to Shakespeare. Here, aptly, broaching the ‘one very important dimension of the common’ as yet unconsidered, ‘which is the question of popularity’ (p. 277), Rhodes pairs 1 Henry IV, as the most popular play of its own time, with Hamlet, the most popular for all the rest. The Henry IV plays are not only ‘common’ because metatheatrically ‘popular’, but also – and Rhodes suggests the two facts are not unconnected – ‘above all … about commonwealth and community; about rank and the social order, and the liberating fantasies of its dissolution; about disruption, levelling, and repair’, becoming a ‘perfect expression of the saturnalian character of the theatre [as directed] … towards a necessary moral end’ (p. 279). Hamlet here conveys Shakespeare’s charged commitment to the ‘common stage’ in a time of diverging ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the English theatres. ‘No single work’ captures the cultural and ideological tension between ‘pure’ and ‘common’, or turns the sixteenth century quite so pivotally, as Hamlet – self-reflexive, metatheatrical, aesthetically judgemental while also acknowledging ‘the social responsibility of the artist’ (p. 291). Via economic value in Troilus and Cressida, and critique of the commonplace and cliché in the Poets’ War, this chapter ends with the anthologies and printed miscellanies which established, for the first time, ‘something like a canon of English literature’ (p. 297), definitively enlisting drama to the same status as poetry. Thus, ‘With the dawning of the seventeenth century we enter the age of critique’ (p. 300). Common sets itself a large project, commanding a vast realm of subject matter. Rhodes is as adept with university drama as metrical psalms, as Shakespeare, as Marlowe, as humanist dialogues – and ‘the changing idea of the common’ is an umbrella which works. His learnedness is such that its occasional irreverence is sometimes (not unwelcomely) startling: in the judging panel on Marlowe’s purple prose and mighty lines, Horace, Nashe, and Thomas Brabine sandwich ‘The much admired British actor Bill Nighy’ explaining, quite engrossingly enigmatically, ‘that he was reluctant to take on Shakespeare [because] he felt in the same way as Keith Richards did about Mozart, that he didn’t have a drummer’.4 With just the right sense of humour, this is perhaps precisely the middle-way conversation between high and low that Rhodes seeks to strike a Renaissance path for. Maybe the point is not that Common is timely, but rather that we have been asking these questions of literature for a long time – how to teach it with ethics and purpose, and where it might be dangerous; how to make it exciting, and to recognise where it is exciting chiefly when dangerous; how usefully to wonder if the correlation is unavoidable; how to make literature look tolerable to people who would have its guts, or gut its funding. Who can it improve, and how? How can we get better at improving people through it? These questions do seem worth historicising partly through the arbitrating argot of the modern university. Common is a richly illustrated argument, and a welcome contribution to the great debate on early modern STEM, Should Teaching English Matter? Footnotes 1 The Humanities and Social Sciences at A Level, British Academy briefing (Aug. 2018), <https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/TheHumanitiesAndSocialSciencesAtALevel2018.pdf>, p. 2. 2 Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities (London 2017) pp. 2–3. 3 Rita Felski, ‘Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle Class’, PMLA, 115/1 (2000) pp. 33–45: 42. Rhodes, in Common, is not in conversation with Felski, but much of her work over the past two decades on class and literary criticism – as well as Heather Love’s after it – seems to raise questions which lie along interestingly similar lines, albeit considering different literary periods, and from within (and in response to) a much more outwardly theory-centric culture of literary pedagogy and practice. In what seems to me a particularly productive relation to Common, see also Felski’s ‘The Invention of Everyday Life’, in Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York 2000) pp. 77–98, and Heather Love, ‘Critique is Ordinary’, PMLA, 132/2 (2017) pp. 364–70. 4 This footnoted to the Observer Food Monthly by Rhodes, 15 March 2009, p. 266. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Whichever Common People Do
JF - The Cambridge Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/camqtly/bfy035
DA - 2019-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/whichever-common-people-do-PJO6p80bng
SP - 289
VL - 48
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -